1. Field of Invention
The present utility model relates to a heater assembly for an automatic tablet sorting and counting machine commonly referred to as "automatic tablet dispenser", and more specifically to an improved heater assembly for an automatic tablet dispenser which enables the tablets dropped from a tablet dropping unit to be packaged into a provided portion of packaging paper.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Automatic tablet dispensers are generally employed in hospitals, pharmacies, and drugstores to automate the output and assembly of corresponding tablets when the prescription is input into a computer. They serve to dispense the per-dosage assembled tablets in individual single serving packages.
A conventional automatic tablet dispenser includes the following: a main computer for calculating an appropriate prescription on the basis of the type of medicine, intake method, daily intake frequency and intake duration depending upon each patient; a tablet dropping unit having a plurality of tablet cassettes and a drum for storing therein and releasing therefrom the tablets in correspondence to the prescription set up in the computer; and a packaging unit disposed below the tablet dropping unit which serves to package a quantity of tablets and release the same to an exterior of the automatic tablet dispenser.
The packaging unit is made up of: a discharge hopper for assembling the tablets being dropped from the tablet drop unit; a heater assembly for packaging the tablets being discharged through the discharge hopper; a printer for printing respective information on packaging paper; and a release conveyer for externally discharging the medicine bags containing tablets.
The heating assembly in the packaging unit serves to serially seal one-time dosage paper sections of provided packaging paper. Here, the one-time dosage paper contains one-time dosage of tablets. That is, a pair of heating rollers are provided to pull while sealing the supplied packaging paper. The heater assembly in the automatic tablet dispensing system performs sealing and partial cutting of the provided packaging paper.
A disadvantage of conventional heating rollers is that they have flat sealing surface so that there may occur a slipping phenomenon during the pulling and sealing process, thereby deteriorating a smooth pulling of the packaging paper. Furthermore, when the packaging paper is not accurately pulled between the heating rollers due to such a slipping phenomenon, a next batch of tablets may be dropped before the initial batch tablets are packaged, thereby deteriorating a smooth packaging operation of the dropping tablets.